I know that so far I've been writing more of new technology and it's impact on our lives, or its presence in it, but this article will be a little different. Yesterday, while strolling through the internet, I stumbled upon a few videos regarding Aging and current ongoing studies which are aimed to stop aging, or at least slow it down. Even though none of the techniques have been tested on humans yet, the results are very promising. After the trials on model organisms - mice - the preliminary results show that we could increase our lifespan by up to 40-50% or if we are succesful, maybe even double the maximal possible age of human being. According to that study, we could also free ourselves of the majority of diseases and illnesses resulting from our body's malfunctions and cell fatigue, like i.e Alzheimer, or heart failure. Maybe one day we could forget about such thing as natural death, or senescence as a whole? This sounds like a utopian world - nobody dies from illness, we live eternity with our loved ones, we never get to know how it's like to be old, nor we fear of death, which we don't know, yet we know is inevitable. But would it be really a good world? Do we really want to never ever find eternal peace in the never-ending darkness? While curing those illnesses might be a great achievement and we could all benefit from that without some side effects, I have some concerns about the matter of "curing" death. I think that while talking and thinking of it, we all should not only focus on its impact on life of each of us, but mainly on the social effect of this. How could we have a world of immortal humans? Earth would overpopulate within few years, not mentioning the food problems, just like in the world described in
Dmitry Glukhovsky's sci-fi book "Futu.re", and I think that his vision of world full of immortal humans, with death curable just like common flu, with injections, is very propable within next hundred years or so. According to some studies, it's certain that within our lifetime the technique to extend our lives or grant us forever-lasting youth will be developed. And it might be an amazing, for example if used on astronauts that would go colonize mars, or explore deep space, because they would more than anybody on Earth have a great use of enchanced cell regeneration, or invulnerability to majority of diseases. But the Earth citizens? Apart from the first impression we get, that it could be something amazing to live with your loved ones forever, to meet your grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc, we would need to shift our mindset about anything completely. Maybe, knowing that we'll be around here longer we'd give more time to gaining knowledge, or exploring what we are really good at? Well, maybe. On the other hand, that would contradict all the processes in the Universe that have been around for like... Forever? Everything has some beginning, its greatness time and its dawn, and then the end. If we stayed in the golden years period, it would bee so much different than all we as humanity have faced so far. We'd be given the power of gods - to say whether we live or not. And I personally think that's not something that humans should be granted, that a choice like this is something so much bigger than we are, so that we should decide about it.
Thank you for reading this week's post, I hope You enjoyed it and wasn't put off by it's size ;) It's a very hard topic to discuss, yet very important, and I think everyone of us have thought of it at some point of our lives. So, what are your thoughts - should we really be given the ability to decide whether we want to say goodbye to the Grim Reaper and walk away to eternal happiness here on Earth?
Explore sources that inspired me to write this article:
https://www.leafscience.org/blog/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoJsr4IwCm4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C25qzDhGLx8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjdpR-TY6QU
https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/science-and-future/no-more-aging-scientists-have-found-a-way-to-stop-even-reverse-the-aging-process-in-humans-331796.html
https://futurism.com/a-new-stem-cell-treatment-had-striking-anti-aging-results/
Even if scientists came up with ways to prolong our lives (and good health, without which long life is pretty useless) forever, we would very soon start fighting for the scarce resources (see Mad Max) and kill each other off effectively until the population was down to a sustainable number. So, unless we find ways of keeping the earth's population under control, we are doomed anyway. Sorry for the dystopian vision of the future.
OdpowiedzUsuńInteresting and well presented topic.
OdpowiedzUsuńI think it's not as good as it seems to us now. We tend to seek for a solution to every problem we have and that's in our nature since always. Though in my opinion it would be a very boring and sad world where all people live forever and have nothing to worry about even if we could solve the problem of space on earth and somehow produce enough food.
OdpowiedzUsuń